Tempodivalse:
Sure. But I think the more important point is: you don't get to decide what is standard or accepted Esperanto. If the Esperanto speaking community does not use icxismo or similar reforms, the reforms will simply continue to be considered wrong.

The way a language grows is by people using it "wrong" untill it becomes popular. The question isn't should we make a radical change and force everyone to follow, it is: Are there enough suporters to start using this and be understood?

Say you start using the word "icxo" as "malino" and everything else stays the same. Then "amikicxo" means "malina amiko", "patricxo" means "patro" and thats it. If that catches on maybe the language will change further and maybe not...
EDIT: "patro" would still also mean father ofcourse

For the time being it doesn't look like it is very popular in the esperanto community, but it might be wellknown enough to be understood (allthough people will lash out at you). Sweedish had a similar situation with a genderneutral pronom a few years ago "han/hun"->"hen". Anyone sweedish who can tell me how that has caught on?

sproshua:and to answer your question, i'll have two years under my belt this summer.

That wasn't my question. My question was, how fluent are you? This is a question unrelated to how long you've been involved with it. Can you think in Esperanto, dream in Esperanto, have a normal conversation without pausing constantly in the middle of a sentence to look for a word? When you read a text, are you simply understanding it, or are you parsing it out and translating it into English in your head? Because the kind of reform you're suggesting, it's hard to imagine a fluent person suggesting such a change. A fluent person usually ceases to think about the mechanics of a such a basic word, and simply uses the word.

I am not sure why you are talking about identity and implying that I am trying to impose my identity on someone. Someone identifies as a man or as a woman or as something nonbinary or as something in between, but that doesn't really change the fact that the vocabulary word "virino" describes someone identifying as a woman in Esperanto. A person who refuses to use "virino" and who insists on some other made-up word is roughly equivalent to someone insisting on "womyn" in English (and has roughly the same chance of succeeding as our "womyn" supporter). Is this the kind of English speaker you are, do you make up brand new words to replace English words that you have a problem with? And if not, why not?

The question isn't should we make a radical change and force everyone to follow, it is: Are there enough suporters to start using this and be understood?

In the case of icxismo, this appears (based on my observations) highly unlikely. Icxismo has simply failed, the same way komputoro failed - it and other words tried to compete with komputilo, but were rejected by the language community. If you look at just about any serious or semi-serious text, you will not see any trace of icxismo. It tried to compete and went nowhere.

Could it come back? Could Esperantists suddenly start using komputoro en masse again? Perhaps, but it looks highly unlikely from our vantage point. Once a form has failed to catch on for such a long time, normally it stays buried. How many people today remember 17th-18th century English neologisms that were abandoned after one generation of speakers? I have a nice collection of them. Looks like "fake English".

Essentially: Iĉismo has not followed the trajectory of successful Esperanto evolutions, or of successful evolutions in most languages. Instead of being very slowly and gradually accepted (snowballing), it has remained completely unused even after many Esperantists were made aware of it.

Tempodivalse:How many people today remember 17th-18th century English neologisms that were abandoned after one generation of speakers? I have a nice collection of them. Looks like "fake English".

I would love to see this.

Essentially: Iĉismo has not followed the trajectory of successful Esperanto evolutions, or of successful evolutions in most languages. Instead of being very slowly and gradually accepted (snowballing), it has remained completely unused even after many Esperantists were made aware of it.

Yep you've got a problem with your reform when its biggest proponents don't speak the language that well. It's kind of a red flag.

Incidentally though I hate the word "mojosa", this isn't a problem with it. It can legitimately be said to have caught on, though to hear it is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. -iĉ- -- not so much.

i said nothing about imposing an identity on someone. i merely said that i'm coming at this from a perspective of self-identity, and that being addressed a certain way, or using a certain vocab, is important to some people. like when i was taught to address my third grade teacher as Ms., not Miss or Mrs..

anyway, on a whim i visited the forums here and saw that someone wanted to "destroy" or "wound" such ideas. i'm not really interested in carrying on this conversation. mi eliĝas ĉi tie.

rapn21:

Kirilo81: The mere suffix is not problematic, whereever it comes from, but its application to roots, which are male according to the definition in the Universala Vortaro. A patro is a man, you can't change this into patro 'parent', patriĉo 'father'. But you can introduce parento (or whatever you like) and derive from it both parentiĉo 'father' and parentino 'mother' on equal grounds, solving at the same time the problem of neutral parento(j) = classical cumbersome "patro(j) kaj/aŭ patrino(j)".

But surely the addition of a suffix is easier than adding twenty new roots? Wouldn't it be less change and disruption?

Unfortunately it's not only the addition of one suffix but also the implicit change of the meaning of existing roots.

In Fundamenta Esperanto "patro" means "father". In Iĉisma Esperanto "patro" means "parent".

That's the problem.

erinja:

Tempodivalse:How many people today remember 17th-18th century English neologisms that were abandoned after one generation of speakers? I have a nice collection of them. Looks like "fake English".

I would love to see this.

It's "Forgotten English" by one Jeffrey Kacirk. A nice little number. Some of the listed words are of Old English derivation that simply became obsolete; others were coined and then abandoned shortly thereafter - the latter is somewhat analogous to obsolete Esperanto neologisms.

One such example is gimlet-eyed - "a sharp-sighted and inquisitive person" - which didn't make it out of the 19th century England.

I have not voted because I don't find any of the answers fitting [for me]. I do agree that when a good writer introduces new words they attain a historic start. Goethe and Luther really added a lot to my mother tongue [German] and I really enjoy reading Lewis Carroll in English and Paulo Freire in Portuguese because their additions to the respective language are so enriching and creative. Since I am pretty fluent in Esperanto [I just spent almost the whole day speaking it with an excellent speaker, directing him through traffic in Miami (!!!!) and planning and post-discussing meetings with officials while working on organizing the Lando Kongreso for next year] I would have a really hard time switching all of the nouns like "patro", "avo", "onklo", "frato" and "nepo" to non-gendered meanings, having to add -iĉ- when consciously referring to a male - though we actually don't use those words more than 1% of the time. But I DO get the point that words are a "frame" of thought. And since I am gay and I live in a mostly gay community and work in one, I use "malgeja" for those who are not gay if I have to make a point of it. So, from my point of view, of course, the "non-marked" form is gay and the "marked" form is "malgeja".
I suppose that if someone were writing about parenting and that person used "patro" as a non-gendered word, after a few paragraphs I wouldn't think of it any more and would "understand" what the author was getting at. I am not the language police and I am not looking for one, either.
This is why I really wish that there were some place on earth where people spoke Esperanto on a daily basis for all their activities. They would forget all the polemics about "language creation" because they would simply be concentrated on being understood and being creative in their own, individual way. It would be very interesting.

bartlett22183: Why is it that people will accept all kinds of oddities, quirks, twists, strangeness, and inconsistencies in so-called "natural" languages but get bent all out of shape over a mere 20-or-so words in another living language, Esperanto?

That's pretty obvious, because Esperanto was created in a laboratory, so to speak. Since it's a meticulously created language, its parts were carefully picked, that pretty much gives people the idea that they too can modify it, treat it like a computer program. Natural languages are merely the result of people’s need for communication and thought development. They evolved and heavily changed as time passed by. Esperanto differs from them in that it wants to remain immutable, grammar-wise. Most people don’t want to modify natural languages because they are spoken by a community with a long history and well defined culture, a ‘’something’’ that defines them and gives them identity; it’s like a glue, a damn strong glue. Not only is Esperanto not spoken by a well geographically placed community but it is also a language whose speakers don’t really convey a sense of unity through history and culture, rather, Esperanto represents a vague (to me) idea of bringing together individuals from different backgrounds and languages. In other words, natural languages are like well glued materials, carefully carved by the passage of time and social evolution, they naturally evolved as its speakers and the world around them did, Esperanto is more like a law-language, which aims to break the well defined naturalness and mutability of languages by creating an unbreakable fundamento. You can view Esperanto as a robot, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s simply different. It has to be different since its main purpose is to allow direct communication in a fast and effective way between individuals who don’t share a common language. Though, I consider Esperanto to be vastly different from natural languages precisely because of that, grammar immutability makes it cold and robotic to me, it isn’t bad for formal and academic communication purposes, but for the colorfulness and the marks that languages leave with every idiom, every saying, every mistake and every change Esperanto is alien and unsuitable. You can’t have it both ways; culture, sayings and mutability are what make languages what they are. Esperanto serves a purpose, it does it well, but to me it doesn’t serve it in the same way and at the same level as the rest of languages do. Esperanto or any other constructed language, and the rest of languages serve the same purpose, communication, but they do it in very different ways at a deeper level.

I hope I made myself understood .